Sex as a Relational Phenomena and the “Male Gaze”

Central to the understanding of sexuality I’m developing in my book Civilization and Its Contents is that it is fundamentally a relational phenomena. What makes our actions sexual is just the physical acts we do. After all, many of those acts can be sexual or not depending on context. A female doctor examining the penis of a male patient is not a sexual act.  What makes an act sexual is that is  designed to elicit sexual desire and arousal on the part of ourselves and our partners. Two people are having sex not just because of what they do to each other but because what they do intends to express their own sexual desire and, in doing so, elicit sexual desire and arousal in their partners by their recognition of that intention–as well as by the pleasure one’s partner receives .[1]

Now this general point about sexuality can be misunderstood if we think of the play of intention in sexual behavior as that which is common in patriarchal societies in which sexual interactions are structured in large part by what I have called “dominator sexuality” in which men often express their desires through what has come to be called the “male gaze” or thought the conquest of women.

The idea of the male gaze film was introduced by scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey in her now famous 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, although the notion is anticipated by Simone de Beauvoir.

Mulvey holds that argued that many films sexualize women for the men who view the. Woman is “spectacle”, and man is “the bearer of the look”.

The distinctive feature of the male gaze is that it objectifies women. So it is  not concerned, at least not initially, with any of the desires, let alone the sexual desires, of the women on which it focuses. The male gaze does seek to stimulate the sexual desires of the men who look at women. But it does so by holding the women gazed upon up to some standard of beauty and, in doing so, asserts the power to evaluate and judge them and / or by giving a man an opportunity to fantasize about having sex with her. And what makes a woman desirable is not her particular her personal qualities, and not even the particular ways in which she looks. Rather it is the standards upheld by men of that time and place.

When I was 16 one of my child hood friends said to me something I did not initially understand a at all: “I want to marry a woman who looks good in expensive clothes.” Later it became clear: what makes a woman attractive to him is not the peculiar features of her personality or even her look but the other men take to be not just attractive but difficult to attain. Thus the sexual frisson created by the male gaze would seem not to be created by the mutual recognition of sexual desire—as my understanding of mutual sexual attraction—but, rather, by the challenge women who meet the male standard of beauty pose to the man’s desire to possess the woman sexually. Conquest not the pleasure of sexual touch let alone mutual interaction is the goal.

The male gaze does not seek, at least in the first instance, the sexual desire of a woman for a man. Rather it is the negation of the importance of her desires. (And of course that negation is a way for men to free themselves from  dependence on women.) The goal of conquest is to have one’s way. How that happens is of secondary importance. Consent to having sex is optional. And even when a man seeking to dominate a woman does seek her consent, it is not, as my approach to sexuality puts it, through recognition of his particular desire for her. For, again, the male gaze is not primarily an expression of sexual desire but rather of a man’s power to evaluate and judge women. And the sexual desire such men seek to elicit in women is not based on any a recognition of their  desire for her—which is recognition of the desire of a particular man for their particular features of appearance and character—but of their power and status compared to hers. Just like the male gaze is focused on how a woman meets some conventional standard of beauty, the male who is gazing is not seeking recognition for the particularities of his character or appearance but, rather on the extent to which he meets some standards of desirability which may mean his appearance but far more often his wealth and power. And the standards of wealth and power are set by other men not b women.

The male gaze then, like patriarchal sex in general, is not just or mainly an expression of desire but an expression of power and status in general and of the desire to dominate a particular women through the recognition of a man’s power and status. Men pursing sex as conquest may ultimately seek subjective willingness on the part of women to accept their conquest. But willingness is based not on sexual desire but a recognition of the power of the conquerer. And the wealth and power of the male conquerer is important to women because it can be used to protect her from other men or provide good things for her. For both women and men under patriarchy, sex is fundamental transactional not with regard to the internal goods of sexual activity–pleasures and emotional connection–but with regard to external goods of wealth and power and social esteem.

That doesn’t mean that patriarchal sexuality is not reflexive. Patriarchal men are still aroused, in part, by the desires of the women with whom they seek to have sex. But it is the woman’s willingness to become a conquest, or in the most awful cases, inability to resist conquest because the man the resources to make her dependent of the physical power to overcome her.

Of course, the male gaze and this dominator model of sexuality is a way to diminish the agency of women and put them in their place. Women subject to it feel objectified and judged and that, in turn, undermines their self-confidence and independence. And it can also restrain their sexual desires. In a world in which men seek to negate those desires and conquer women, a woman’s sexual desire makes her vulnerable in at least two ways. On the one hand, if her genuine sexual desires leads her to become sexually involved with a man seeking domination through sexuality, she is likely to become involved with men who do not respond to her desires in the same way but, rather use her sexually and then discard her. And because men seeking to dominate women are uninterested in the particular sexual desires of women they are not likely to be concerned with  providing them with sexual pleasure. And, on the other hand, because such men seek to negate the sexual desires of women and measure them solely by “objective” standards, as woman who expresses sexual desire or an interest in emotional connection with a man actually devalues herself in his eyes. The pleasure of sexual conquest is heightened by the difficulty of attaining it and a woman who is “easy” because she desires sexual pleasure itself is less valuable. And if such a women is especially interested in sexual pleasure they are sex-shamed and called “sluts” by men seeking domination over women and, of course, everyone who shares in the culture of sexual domination.  [2]

While dominator sexuality does limit women and put them in their place it does not leave them with no agency at all. Women caught in a system of dominator sexual can make themselves more beautiful and thus more desirable by their bearing, their dress, and their makeup. And they can make themselves more valuable by their reticence and even disdain for the men who gaze upon them. But of course all these ways of expressing agency also limit women and, perhaps even more importantly the kinds of relationships they can form with their partners. A relationship based on a deep emotional and / or sexual connections to their partners are impossible, let alone one in which emotion is expressed sexually.

And while men do have an upper hand in relationships of sexual domination, they too are limited. Though they are the agents who determine whether to form a relationship or not, deep emotional and sexual relationships are not available to them either. And while men are the active partners in sexual relationships determining when and how sex is performed, their sexual pleasure, no less than that of their partners, is likely to be limited. When men take total control over sex, women are far less likely to be sexually stimulated in ways that bring them great pleasure or orgasms. In some forms of dominator sexuality, skill in bringing women to orgasm is, sometimes regarded as a sign of a powerful man although that motive is as likely to lead to fake orgasms as real ones. (I come back to this in “The Myth of Male Orgasm.”)  But male sexual pleasure is also limited by dominator sexuality. On the one hand, the urge to dominate others is tied to an unwillingness to lose control To lose control is both to become vulnerable and to allow ones’s well being to be affected by forces outside oneself. But central to the experience of orgasm at its best is giving up control—to the processes taking place in one’s body, to what one’s partner is doing to oneself, and at times, even to the deep sense of connection to a world beyond oneself and the forces and spirit it contains. That is to say that even if our activity leads to an orgasm, the experience of powerful orgasms is partly a matter of receptivity as well as activity. That’s why we say we have orgasms. We can bring ourselves to orgasm but when we finally get there they happen to us. And what is true of orgasm is also true of sexual pleasure in general. As I show in chapter X, You’re The Top: Activity and Receptivity in Sexuality, there is are somewhat different kinds of pleasure to be found in taking a more active or receptive role in a sexual encounter—and perhaps even more in one that mixes these roles up in creative ways. A man who is unwilling to ever take a more receptive role in sexuality is, in other words, missing out.

Dominator sexuality also undermines the pleasure of men because it ultimately limits how much sex men are likely to have. Men often complain about the unwillingness of their partners to have sex as of as they themselves would like. However  if dominator sex for men does not aim at providing  women with sexual pleasure let alone orgasms–or worse involves dismissing or diminishing  or ignoring their pleasure, women will certainly resist it.  Who wants to always be an object of conquest?

Patriarchal sex between men and  women then degenerates into a transactional relationship between master and slave, in which the weaker party, the woman, has every incentive to deny the stronger one, the man,  what they he wants as often as possible in order to raise the price of what the woman can get for allowing her body to be used.

I  understand sexuality as an interaction in which two people seek to arouse one another sexually in part through having the other person recognize that they are sexually aroused by them. Dominator sexuality is one form in which the relational character of sexuality is found. Dominator sexuality like all forms of sexuality does rest on mutual recognition of some kind between man and woman (and since it can exist in homosexual relationships although in slightly different form, between one sexual partner or another).The phenomenon of the male gaze and all that goes with it only exists because sexuality is a meaningful human phenomenon in which our sexual relationships are necessarily structure by the nature of our desires for one another. If those intentions did not matter, men could not be aroused by the thought of conquering a woman who meets some social standards of beauty or is aroused by his power and social standing. And women would not be aroused by (even locally) powerful or famous or wealthy men. That is to say that dominator sexuality ultimately also depends on mutual recognition not, however, of the subjective desires but of the “objective” standards each partner meet—standards of beauty and on the part of a woman and of beauty, power, and wealth on the part of a man.

Dominator sexuality is not the only way in which sex is a relational phenomena. Indeed it strikes me as a degenerate form of the relationality of sex precisely because it is a way that, as we saw above, men seek to diminish the importance of the particular desires of women to their own sexual arousal. Indeed the leading feature of dominator / patriarchal sexuality is that men seek to become independent of the desires—the subjectivity—of those with whom they seek to have sex. And, as a result, it limits and diminishes th pleasures to be found in sex. For men as well as women, dominator sexuality requires and an estrangement from oneself and one’s own desires as well as that of one’s partner.

[1] This section of the chapter is a product of questions and comments made by Karly Whitaker to an earlier version of this work.

[2] Tracy Clark-Flory has written a wonderful memoir, “Want Me,” that explores these issues in some depth and with the kind of particularity I can’t pursue here. She writes about how her interests in both pursuing sexual pleasure  and appealing to men led her, like so many people, to explore pornography. In doing so she not only adjusted her appearance but her sexual activities to fit what she saw in pornography. She framed her own sexual desires in order to appeal to the sexual desires she saw men express in pornography.  From her account it seems clear that some of the men she was with were both surprised and  not particularly engaged or attracted to her willingness to repeat the kinds of scenes drawn from the pornography she saw. And she didn’t secure as much pleasure—or orgasms—as she hoped. In one of the episode the frames the book, in which Clark-Flory attends a shoot for a pornographic film and talks to a few male performers who she finds are laughing at how “girls these days” think that the kind of sex they want in their private life is what the do on screen. Clark-Flory, laughs along with them but ruefully says, “the joke was on me.”  There is much more to be learned from this excellent book that I won’t discuss here  but I do want to say for those who don’t read it all, that being and intelligent and reflective woman, Clark-Flory was not hurt in the long term by the way the dominator sexuality of pornography shaped her view of male desire and also her own sexual desires because she ultimately saw through them. One wonders how many women do not escape this trap, however. And how many men also get a distorted picture of sexuality in the same way. (More on the latter issue in “The Myth of Male Orgasm.”)

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